1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to speech recognition and, more specifically, to speech recognition systems used to recognize groups of words that have observable relationships.
2. Description of the Related Art
Global Positioning System (GPS)-based navigation systems have recently become available in some automobiles. To use these systems, a driver must enter an address or location, typically with a touch screen. The navigation system then provides instructions (usually with a map, arrow displays, or a synthesized voice) that directs the driver from the present location to the desired location.
Although current navigation systems work quite well at providing directions, a driver cannot enter new locations via the touch screen while the car is moving. And even when the car is stopped, using a touch screen to enter an address can be slow and difficult.
Replacing or supplementing the touch screen with a speech recognition system would make navigation systems much easier to use, and would make it possible for a driver to enter an address while the car is moving. However, it is well known that recognition of spoken addresses is an extremely difficult task because of the huge number of street and city names that such a speech recognition system would need to recognize. See, for example, the discussion in U.S. Pat. No. 5,177,685 to Davis et al., at column 24, lines 45–56.
One way to reduce the “search space” of a speech recognizer is to use a “prompt and response” type interface. These systems typically prompt the speaker to say only one word or short phrase at a time. For example, the speaker may be prompted to say only a street number or only a city name. This allows the system to perform a series of much simpler speech recognition passes, rather than performing the very difficult task of recognizing an entire spoken address or other long phrase.
Although prompt and response systems simplify the speech recognition task, they can be both slow and annoying to use because they require the speaker to answer a series of questions. Accordingly, there remains a need for speech recognition system that allows the speaker to say an address or other difficult to recognize phrase in a single utterance and have that utterance understood and acted upon.